2010-11-21

The rallying cry of the week - Don't Touch My Junk. There have been ll sorts of responses to the incident, from outrage at the TSA's degrading and humiliating procedures to support for the minor inconveinence that is proven to make all of America over nine thousand percent safer.

And it's not just the TSA that's been commented on recently, John Tyner the man who taped his encounter with the attempted enhanced patdown has ben hailed as a hero for personal rights as well as a bothersome troublemaker. In fact, the deranged fringe leftest of the left hold him up as a symbol of the entitled chauvinist society they love to disparage, by pointing out that women, especially large breasted ones, children and minorities have been undergoing these types of outrages for years.

But the one group that has escaped speculation in this case is probably the group that bears the most blame. High-speed rail advocates.

Whenever situations like this arise, the first question that should come to mind is "Who Benefits?" and the obvious answer is mass transit activists. Every single indignity forced upon air travellers, from taking off their shoes and not travelling with toothpast or shampoo to choosing between posing for naked photos or being groped and fondled by a stranger. Each and every one of these serves to bolster the support for a network of high-speed rail.

And consider also, these screening techniques have always been implemented in response to a terror attack. The shoe-bomber forced us to stand around in socks at airport screening. The tranatlantic liquid explosives plot cost us the freedom to bring fluids in our carry-ons. And this latest assault on a persons and privacy is the result of the Christmas underpants bomber. And while the grand total of damages directly caused by those attacks were that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab burned his crotch - these were all very serious incidents.